death.

In my world death was like a nameless and incomprehensible hand, a door-to-door salesman who took away mothers, beggars, or ninety-year-old neighbours, like a hellish lottery.

But I couldn’t absorb the idea that death could actually walk by my side, with a human face and a heart that was poisoned with hatred, that death could be dressed in a uniform or a raincoat, queue up at a cinema, laugh in bars, or take his children out for a walk to Ciudadala Park in the morning, and then, in the afternoon, make someone disappear in the dungeons of Montjunic Castle or in a common grave with no name or ceremony.

Going over all this in my mind, it occured to me that perhaps the papier-mache world that I accepted as real was only a stage setting. Much like the arrival of Spanish trains, in those stolen years you never knew when the end of childhood was due.

- Carlos Ruis Zafon, The Shadow of the Wind.